Turbine Entertainment is looking for new headquarters in the Boston area (they’re currently south of Boston in Westwood, MA) and is adding staff. Among the jobs listed:
To the best of my knowledge, they don’t have any ‘officially announced’ console games at this point. Maybe we’ll hear something at E3?
In an attempt to get folks to return to their two Everquest games, Sony has re-enabled all old accounts for six weeks or so, ending at the end of July. I’ve played Everquest 2 on and off since it launched in the fall of 2004 (I think?) but irregularly enough that my highest level character is still in his 30’s (cap is currently at 80). But I figured I’d give it another go. Angela is a long time fan of the game and is always trying to get me to come back anyway, so why not do it while the free-clock is running.
So I’ve been following my usual lackadaisical pattern of puttering around and not really accomplishing much up until last night. That’s when Angela and a couple of old friends who I’ve been gaming on and off with since Ultima Online broke out their low-level alts and dragged me off on an adventure. And what fun we had!! I was rusty as hell and got us killed more times that I’d care to recount, but the gang was ever-patient and gave me tips as we went along and I slowly got the hang of things. We started at, oh, 7:30 pm or so, and it was 11:30 before the demands of my belly (we still hadn’t had dinner!) and the need for serious equipment repairs, forced us to retire for the night.
I’m generally awfully antisocial in MMOs, oddly enough. I have a weird combination of personality traits, shyness and impatience, that make it really difficult to do well in any kind of a group. But last night really reminded me of how great these games can be when you’re with friends. I haven’t had so much fun since my days with the Blood Ravens of Kirin Tor in WOW.
I might just have to extend my Everquest 2 sub past the free time period now!
So we got a couple of copies of the retail version of Dungeon Runners today. One of the perks of the retail version (you can download and play the game for free if you wish) is that you get 6 months of “Premium” gameplay, and a Bling Gnome. Price is $20, and Premium access is generally $5/month, so its a good deal.
I’d played Dungeon Runners before and liked it well enough. It’s a semi-MMO. Towns are communal but dungeons hold only your party. It’s very hack and slashy, with tons of loot, each bit of which is rife with prefixes and suffixes. The whole tone is extremely tongue-in-cheek. Since I last played, the humor has gotten even more sophomoric, with fart jokes all over the place.
As to the Bling Gnome… well, he’s this nasty little creature that follows you around and picks up all the piles of gold coins that drop from creatures, which is pretty convenient and streamlines gameplay a good bit. He also has an ‘active skill’ that will cause him to pick up trash loot, eat it, and excrete gold coins, which he’ll then pick up for you. Every time he does this, there’s a chance he’ll excrete a nice loot item. The game play mechanic here is great, but honestly his little animation, complete with clouds of noxious green vapor, gets old pretty quickly. Since you target mobs by clicking on them, the gnome can get in the way, too.
I wouldn’t say the Bling Gnome is worth running out and buying the game for, but if you download the free client and like it, it’s very much worth the $20 for full access to the game (so called “Rainbow” items…the best loot, is only usable by paid accounts) for six months, and the Gnome is a decent convenience feature once you learn to ignore his antics.
Raph Koster gives a brief demo of MetaPlace:
Areae’s MetaPlace has been revealed.
Check out the site (linked below) or this article:
Areae Debuts Metaplace, Virtual Worlds for Everyone
Their CrunchBase entry:
Areae’s Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce.
Most virtual worlds are walled gardens making it hard to get data in and out of the worlds. Metaplace-created virtual worlds can be embedded into your Facebook page, MySpace page, or your own blog via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.
The Metaplace network links all the worlds together. Each of them can be completely different including virtual apartments for decorating, plazas where readings and musical events happen, space-action games, full-blown MMORPGs, casual games, and Amazon storefronts.
And from the FAQ on the MetaPlace site:
Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn’t do much of anything to change their experience. We’re out to change all of that.
Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.
We hope there will be millions of worlds made with Metaplace. It could get hard to find stuff if we’re right, so the portal lets you easily search, rate, review, and tag worlds and games of all sorts. You also get a user profile so you can find each other.
It’s an incredibly exciting concept; I can’t wait to see if it works out. Consider the possibilities if every interested gamer could add a mini-game on their blog, then link them to other gamer’s blogs, or to some larger, central game. A game on every MySpace or Facebook profile?
Yes, there’ll be dreck, there always is, but I’m sure sites will spring up to help rate and manage MetaPlace game lists and so forth.
I’ve signed up for the alpha, though I have no idea if I’ll get in…
Tabula Rasa is an upcoming sci-fi MMO from NCSoft. With a launch date of Oct. 19th, the NDA for beta testers has been lifted. I had the opportunity to beta test the game a bit, so when a friend on a forum expressed his dismay that he wouldn’t be able to play it (he is still on dial-up and the game requires a broadband connection) I was happy to put his concerns at ease.
What follows was originally a forum post, so it’s a bit rough. But it got long enough that I felt it was worth sharing with a potentially wider audience.
——-
Friend says: Minimum specs call for broadband. I knew it would happen someday. I guess I’m not doing this one.
My response:
You aren’t missing out on much, honestly. Well, I’m guessing not. Are you a fan of first person shooters?
It’s a cumbersome melange of FPS and MMO, in my opinion. It has a really awkward interface. And the world and the enemies aren’t very interesting.
Let’s talk about the interface…
Continue reading “Tabula Rasa”
When I saw the first episode of The Guild I was tickled but wary… it was very, very funny and I’m scared to say I could relate to it almost too well. But was it a flash in the pan? Well Episode 2 is out, and it’s just as funny.
You can go to YouTube to watch them but I’m going to tempt you here and now…
Episode 1
Episode 2
There’s a post over at Terra Nova entitled WoW-nnui where the author discusses his lack of interest in World Of Warcraft after, presumably, playing for quite some time.
His main point, admittedly, is to ask what happens to the MMO market as more and more of the 6 million plus WoW players hit this point. But once again, people are treating WoW as some new thing. What happened to the DAOC players when they got bored? What happened to the Everquest players? This isn’t a new phenomenon, after all. Some players will move to a new game, some will realize that their time is better spent in the real world. Same as it ever was.
Don’t get me wrong, I love WoW. But I just get tired of people acting as though it was the first MMO. The scale is different, to be sure. But we’ve been down this road before.
I just finished listening to the podcast version of Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game (and yes, its a deliberate play on Ender’s Game). You can get it at Doctorow’s site or as part of Voices: New Media Fiction at Podiobooks.com.
I highly recommend the story, and particularly to gamers. Its all about a MMORPG and a young girl’s adventures in it. She’s a good player…good enough that there are people willing to pay her real cash to do in-game missions. The intersection of real-world and in-game economies is a fascinating topic to me, and that’s all I’m going to say about the plot, because I don’t want to spoil anything.
Its read by Alice Taylor who is charmingly real. She stumbles here and there, not enough to be distracting but enough that it feels like honest story-telling.
If audiobooks aren’t your thing, the story is also in text form at Salon.
If you’ve ever been a MMO player, watch this.
If you haven’t played you definitely won’t get it. But I can’t imagine what went through this person’s mind as he did this, and then later when the reality of what he did struck home.